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Why America’s Railroads Refuse to Give Their Workers Paid Leave

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341–350 of 388 posts

Re: Why America’s Railroads Refuse to Give Their Workers Paid Leave

#341
post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you mean unions should become actual corporations that sell the service of organized labor to corporations that want it, I completely agree. If workers want to improve their bargaining position, they need to manage the business risks involved with things like workers getting sick themselves instead of relying on employers to do it. Then those risks can be managed in a way that is fair to workers, because they are…

I don't quite get how this is expected to work. Does this somehow avoid a management level of this proposed corporation who are going to be trying to maximize profits at the expense of the employees who are ostensibly in a worse bargaining position? At that point, the decision for the worker is only whether they're working directly for the end-exploiters or just the middle-exploiter.

> Does this somehow avoid a management level of this proposed corporation who are going to be trying to maximize profits at the expense of the employees who are ostensibly in a worse bargaining position?

The corporation that takes the union's role would be owned by the workers; that's the whole point. It would be more like a "worker's cooperative" from that point of view, the way unions as they currently exist are supposed to be, but it would be a corporation from the point of view of other corporations who wanted to hire organized labor, so it would be in a better bargaining position than unionized employees are today. The workers would come to a consensus as a cooperative on things like how the corporation would manage the business risk of unscheduled absences, and then the corporation owned by the workers would sell the service of organized labor to other corporations that wanted it, probably with various different service levels depending on things like how critical unscheduled absences would be, and with higher service levels costing more.

Re: Why America’s Railroads Refuse to Give Their Workers Paid Leave

#342
post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What the freight railroads are doing here is forcing the employees to use their vacation pay when they are sick to discourage them from calling out sick at all, in effect penalizing them for calling out sick. That vacation you had planned with the family? Either lose a day (which may require you to cancel altogether), or come to work sick. If they have paid sick leave, they'd use it when sick rather than showing up…

> This is how many (most) jobs work. US jobs, really. The concept of sick days / requiring taking time off from some pool always struck me as a) horribly abusive, b) ripe for employee abuse (sick days when not sick), c) bad for everyone (workers work when sick). I grew up in Switzerland which doesn't have those. And (to prevent abuse...) you are required to have a doctor's note when sick for more than 3 days. Of cour…

At a base level, what is the source for funds paid to a worker when not working (either by choice or illness) other than funds withheld from the worker when working? The question is the same in Switzerland unless there is cave of sick pay gnomes next to the chocolate making ones.

One might say the funding can come out of a different source, a popular go-to is "profit" or government, but all those are downstream from the value created by the worker.

Re: Why America’s Railroads Refuse to Give Their Workers Paid Leave

#343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The market is perfectly capable of fixing the problem. The employees should quit, strike, or slowdown work until their employers give them what they want.

> The employees should quit, strike, or slowdown work That assumes a situation where workers are able to do these things. Sure, in theory everyone could quit, but then they would need another way to earn money. If employers know that their employees cannot afford to quit or risk losing their job, the whole "the market will fix it" theory falls flat, since there is no market. Not sure how if this is the case for railr…

Or the workers could slowdown if they can't afford to quit. E.g. the workers could say that train cars are going to be limited to X in length and a sympathetic worker would just detach any cars past X. So long as the workers had enough solidarity to pull off doing this anonymously - or similar acts of resistance, I don't see how this would fail to solve the problem.

The workers could decide to stop doing precision train scheduling (or whatever it was called). They could force their employer to give them concessions. If you're saying the workers can't afford to quit or resist then you're saying they have to accept whatever they are given.

Re: Why America’s Railroads Refuse to Give Their Workers Paid Leave

#344
post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't quite get how this is expected to work. Does this somehow avoid a management level of this proposed corporation who are going to be trying to maximize profits at the expense of the employees who are ostensibly in a worse bargaining position? At that point, the decision for the worker is only whether they're working directly for the end-exploiters or just the middle-exploiter.

> Does this somehow avoid a management level of this proposed corporation who are going to be trying to maximize profits at the expense of the employees who are ostensibly in a worse bargaining position? The corporation that takes the union's role would be owned by the workers; that's the whole point. It would be more like a "worker's cooperative" from that point of view, the way unions as they currently exist are su…

Yeah, I don't know why I didn't just think employee-owned. I live half a mile away from a WinCo[0], which has the words "Employee-Owned" in big ol' block letters on it. Thanks for the explanation!

(Though to my knowledge WinCo isn't the friendliest to their employees on the floor when it comes to stock ownership, I can imagine something more fair.)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinCo_Foods

Re: Why America’s Railroads Refuse to Give Their Workers Paid Leave

#345
post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Between the extremes of doing nothing to maintain the status quo and nationalizing an industry, there are countless options. Many of which would be more realistic, more palatable, and more beneficial. In fact, nationalization is so repulsive to most politicians voters that suggesting it is an effective tactic to squash efforts to create meaningful change. A beneficial suggestion would seek to address issues in a way…

> Many of which would be more realistic, more palatable, and more beneficial. In fact, nationalization is so repulsive to most politicians voters that suggesting it is an effective tactic to squash efforts to create meaningful change. Why though? Railways are a natural monopoly and critical infrastructure, so either they have to be state owned or heavily regulated.

Right, so regulation would be the middle ground between state-owned (nationalized) and unregulated.

Re: Why America’s Railroads Refuse to Give Their Workers Paid Leave

#346
This is a hack job of an article. From the first paragraph, “America’s latter-day robber barons can’t comprehend that workers sometimes get sick. ”. Really? So every person with the S&P 500 in their retirement account is a robber baron?

And that was just the first paragraph. The use of similar terms were repeated further in the article.

Read a better article - this one isn’t worth the electrons.

Re: Why America’s Railroads Refuse to Give Their Workers Paid Leave

#347
post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then why did the bill, without paid sick leave, pass both the House and Senate with bipartisan support?

> Then why did the bill, without paid sick leave, pass both the House and Senate with bipartisan support? As I understand it, all but one Democrats (Manchin) voted for the 7 days paid sick leave amendment giving it 52-43 but it needed 60 votes.

[deleted]

Re: Why America’s Railroads Refuse to Give Their Workers Paid Leave

#348
post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My understanding of the FIRST big problem with PSR is that it creates trains longer than the system is designed to handle, thus all the sidings that used to allow trains to pass in single tracked areas are unavailable, which increases fragility of the system in general. This makes precision scheduling impossible... what this really is, is let's make all the workers wait (for free!) while we figure out how we can fina…

What I don’t get is why folks don’t just quit and go to an industry with less abusive labor practices - hell even construction laborers get days off.

AIUI junior folks are leaving and the turnover is ridiculous. Folks with seniority are stuck in large part because of unvested pensions and because certifications often don't transfer to other industries even if the job skills seem like they ought to.

Re: Why America’s Railroads Refuse to Give Their Workers Paid Leave

#349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the workers are so specialized in rail that substitutions from rail to not rail are so poor as to not have an external market as you say, then in turn the workers also have a monopoly as external workers are unable to replace them. If what you say is true I am totally unsympathetic of argumetns against damages being sought from monopolizers who are involved in the shutting down of the rail network for which societ…

> If what you say is true I am totally unsympathetic of argumetns against damages being sought from monopolizers who are involved in the shutting down of the rail network for which society gave up its lands. Great, since the shareholders of these companies are also involved in shutting down the rail network since they refuse to give a humane employment contract, you should be equally unsympathetic to their side. Sinc…

I'm not talking about collecting damages for ethics violations. I'm talking about real damages as a result of shutdowns. If you want to impose additional damages beyond that for ethics, then sure maybe you can argue about who was more/less ethical.

Re: Why America’s Railroads Refuse to Give Their Workers Paid Leave

#350
post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What the freight railroads are doing here is forcing the employees to use their vacation pay when they are sick to discourage them from calling out sick at all, in effect penalizing them for calling out sick. That vacation you had planned with the family? Either lose a day (which may require you to cancel altogether), or come to work sick. If they have paid sick leave, they'd use it when sick rather than showing up…

The problem is the scheduling side of things, not the PTO side. For "knowledge workers" as most of HN is, they can just not show up today and then do today's work tomorrow. But something like a railroad ceases to function at some point and that has severe repercussions. Now likely the "railroad" problem could be solved with some work, imagine a nation-wide company that handles railroad staffing emergencies, with on-d…

> But that cost is what the railroads don't want to pay, as they could also do the same thing by hiring more employees (and have some percentage of them "idling" at any given time).

At one point the article mentions "on call" (the correct term is "Extra List") and that's exactly what you describe. You'd have say an engineer, who may be new and has no regular assignment - he'd put in his early months or years "on call." The company can call him at any time, and say "get to XXX, your train will be there." The whole issue is having enough to cover shortages.

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